What's For Dinner at Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore

Locally-sourced ingredients, sustainable practices, and delicious food: Just some of the reasons why the James Beard-nominated Woodberry Kitchen is such a success. Chef Spike Gjerde gives us a look at the dishes that started it all.

"Snake Oil"

“I started reading William Weaver and Michael Twitty, and became very much inspired by the fish pepper, which was historically grown around the Chesapeake. I loved the heat and flavor of this pepper, so I found this seed company in the Mid-Atlantic, and we encouraged some growers to start doing it. Once the pepper were right, we ground them with salt and aged the mash with vinegar in oak barrels for a year. Then we pass it though the food mill and bottle it.

We use it all over the restaurant—it’s principally a condiment on the table, but it’s also kind of a secret ingredient because it has this incredible depth of flavor that everyone in the kitchen loves to stealthily add to their dishes. From sauces to soups, snake oil almost always makes it way onto the table. The fact that these peppers are part of the Chesapeake food history and that every pepper is grown here in Maryland, they’re like the taste of the place. I really wanted to keep it pure, so we haven’t done a lot to it or played around with the ingredients, though we did with the process. Snake oil is just the purist expression of the pepper.”

Dusan Vuksanovic

Dried and Cured Meats

"A lot of restaurants today call salumi, or Italian-style cured sausages, charcuterie. And we’ve gone down that road, too. But then we started to really connect with the idea of purchasing whole animals from our growers, and not just pork butt from a butcher. And to really do it effectively, to use the best practices, and to return maximum value to those growers, our approach intensified, and we had this greater sense of urgency to use every part of the animal, rather than taking the Italian approach to drying and curing meats. So we go back to the tradition more commonly used in Poland and Germany, techniques that were historically here in the Chesapeake.

We used to have more of a color-by-numbers curing program, and now we have one that’s uniquely Woodberry. Take our Lebanon bologna—it’s a sweet fermented beef bologna that’s not fully emulsified, like Oscar Meyer, which is what you’re probably picturing. I just love it. I first tasted it at my wife’s parents’ house. And our blood sausage we learned from a weekend doing mangalitsa pigs—it’s an Austrian-style blood sausage with a little grain in it. Our smoked boar snack stick is our version of a Slim Jim. The board changes frequently, as we get in three whole animals a week, so it’s whatever the butchers are excited about and new recipes they’re trying. We have a dedicated curing room to hang sausages, other than that it’s just a lot of time and table/storage space. It’s a lot of work—we have three full-time butchers, and we’ll go to five when we open our huge production butchery space, Parts & Labor, this month."

Dusan Vuksanovic

Rockfish Collar with Ramps, Asparagus and Peanut Romesco

"To me, it’s very interesting why we do rockfish collar. First, it expresses a whole-animal approach to a fish, but rockfish, which is what the Chesapeake region calls striped bass, is incredibly important to our aquaculture. Ninety percent of the population spawns in the Chesapeake, and all of the states that have it are involved in the management of the fish, especially Maryland, where we managed the fish with quotas and size restrictions. The fish can’t be too big or too small, so typically we get them at about 18 to 30 inches.

From a chef’s perspective, it’s not great because the yields are smaller. But for management, it’s awesome. A lot of restaurants just buy the filets or throw away the rest. But we always buy our fish whole, usually directly from the waterman so they come in absolutely as they were caught. This dish is a product of fishing management, and our willingness to try to make the most of that fish. Collar is just the perfect little small plate—it’s awesome, flavorful, on the bone, often roasted in wood oven."

"The genesis of this dish is a very straight up appropriation of something that’s very common where my wife comes from in York, Pennsylvania, which is chocolate, marshmallow, and peanuts. It’s a classic sundae. Our take on it was to make our own ice cream (either malt or sweet cream) from our beloved local dairy, make our own wet peanut sauce sourcing directly from a Virginia grower, our own chocloate sauce, which is now sourced from Mast Brothers, and our own marshmallow fluff.

The thing that sold it from day one was this sugar cap that our pastry chef, Isaiah Billington, fused to the top of the dish that you break through. In Pennsylvania, it’s on a lot of ice cream shop menus without any explanation; everyone knows what it is. And now it’s one of the few items we’ve never taken off our menu since we opened."

“This cocktail has become what we call our classics because when we started to really define what the bar program was going to be, we had three drinks that brought that new direction together, and this was one of them,” says Corey Polyoka, bar director at Woodberry.

“It’s built after a Manhattan, but we use rye in ours because it was historically distilled in Baltimore. We started with Pikesville rye—it’s a place in Baltimore where rye was made before prohibition because it had the best story and connection to our spot. Now we’ve connected with a distillery in Pennsylvania called Dad’s Hat that’s making Pennsylvania-style rye, so we’ve since upgraded and now use that one because its truly local. Maryland-style has a richer mouthfeel and it’s a little sweeter with more caramel wood components, while Pennsylvania-style rye is lighter in body and mouthfeel, and slightly more peppery and rye-grain forward. We also dropped all European cordials, all the things you think you need to have, and opted for American vermouth."

Dusan Vuksanovic

Bloody Mary Mix

“Our bloody Mary mix is essentially a by-product of sorts. Before we found a use for all the parts of animals or produce, people called it scrap. We call it trim, because it’s valuable. So the mix isn’t exactly a by-product, but we take the cores and skins from the tomatoes we can every year—last year we did 20,000 pounds and this year we’re hoping for 50,000—and we juice them for the mix.

The first year we did it, used Old Bay seasoning, horseradish not grown locally, and celery salt. No we use lovage for that celery flavor, local horseradish, and some salt and fish pepper, our own blend. Then we add pickle juice to get that acidity and garlicky flavor. We have a killer bloody Mary.”